Lianne Smith callously ignored years of sex abuse by her TV hypnotist lover
Sarah Richardson has no kind words to describe her mother. ‘Cold,’ she says of the woman who gave birth to her, as well as ‘deeply flawed and deluded’.
She wishes she could say something more forgiving, but it’s impossible given the circumstances, which couldn’t be more distressing.
Sarah’s mother, Lianne Smith, 44, is being held in a Spanish jail awaiting trial for the murder of her two youngest children, Becky, five, and 11-month-old Daniel.
The children were found dead in a hotel room in Lloret de Mar on the Costa Brava last May, allegedly smothered with a plastic bag by their mother, who then tried to kill herself.
This devastating tragedy followed the arrest and extradition of Sarah’s stepfather Martin Smith, a 45-year-old former Butlins entertainer turned TV hypnotist, who was wanted back in the UK to face ‘unrelated’ child sex abuse charges.
In a note, Lianne Smith allegedly confessed to the killings saying she couldn’t bear the thought of Becky and Daniel being taken into care over charges which she described as ‘lies’ and ‘utter nonsense’.
Only they weren’t lies, as her eldest child, Sarah, knows only too well. Yesterday, Martin Smith, who once appeared on Living TV’s Most Haunted show, was jailed for 16 years having been found guilty on 11 counts of rape, attempted rape, indecency with a child and indecent assault.
At his trial in December, the court heard how he used violence and hypnotism to abuse his victim for almost a decade, starting in May 1995 when she was seven.
What could not be reported until now, however, is that Martin Smith’s victim was none other than Sarah, Lianne’s own daughter.
It was she who, from the age of seven, was sexually abused and raped by her stepfather. Furthermore, when Sarah tried to tell her mother about the abuse, she was rejected with the words: ‘If you are going to spread lies, you are no daughter of mine. I’m not going to listen to poison like that.’
Sarah, 22, a student nurse, has bravely waived her right to anonymity to tell the full, disturbing story of how the ‘controlling, aggressive and cruel’ stepfather who raised her from the age of four was a ruthless abuser who turned her mother into a stranger — a stranger who was seemingly indifferent to her own daughter’s suffering — and who destroyed their family in the most shocking way imaginable.
Sarah Richardson remembers disliking Martin Smith from the day he came into her life when she was four years old.
Caged: Martin Smith was jailed for 16 years for numerous sexual offences, including for sexually abusing his step-daughter Sarah Richardson, pictured right shortly before he started abusing her
She doesn’t know how Smith and her mother met (they never married but shared a surname), but within a year he’d moved into their home in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear.
‘I didn’t like him from the start. He was strict and moody with a temper,’ says Sarah, who believes her mother had been deeply affected by her early divorce from Sarah’s father, John Hope, who left Lianne when Sarah was three and her younger brother, Chris, was one.
‘Mum asked me to be the one who asked Martin to move in with us, and I told her: “I don’t want him to.” She knew I disliked him, but she just ignored me.
‘He was never nice to me or Chris. I think he saw us as an inconvenience, wanting us to be quiet and out of the way. There was always an atmosphere. It was almost as if they liked to pretend they didn’t have children.’
It wasn’t long, says Sarah, before the physical abuse began. Smith would take a slipper or a belt to her and Chris if they were noisy or didn’t obey him.
‘My mum didn’t stay in the room when he beat us, but she knew what he was doing. Chris would have black eyes, but when we complained, she’d say: “You shouldn’t annoy him.” She was more interested in him being happy than us.’
On one occasion, Sarah saw Smith throw a mug of hot tea over her mother during one of their many ugly rows, and another time he almost broke Lianne’s arm. How her mother can describe him as ‘kind’ Sarah doesn’t know.
When Sarah was six, the family moved to a caravan near Haltwhistle in Northumberland, the first of almost a dozen such moves. Each new home was more remote than the last, and Smith increasingly isolated Lianne from her parents — who did not approve of him — and all friends and relatives.
Matters worsened when Sarah and her brother were taken out of school to be ‘home educated’. So, there were no friends or teachers to confide in, no extended family to keep an eye on them, and no neighbours to raise concerns about their welfare.
That same year, the sexual abuse started. Lianne had taken a job which often meant working at night. ‘I didn’t like my mum leaving us with him, but when I asked her what the job was she’d just say: “I’m not talking about it,”’ Sarah recalls.
‘Martin wasn’t working, and she said she had to earn money to keep us all. I don’t know what she did, but sometimes Martin would drive her to a house and we’d have to lie under blankets on the back seat, and wait in silence for her to return. Then, she started driving off to work by herself, even though she hadn’t passed her driving test, leaving us at home with him.’
Sarah suspects her mother was offering ‘personal services’ in the days before she secured better, more respectable work — first in a library and eventually, ironically, as a child protection expert for Cumbria County Council.
Deeply flawed: Lianne Smith smothered both her son, Daniel, and daughter Becky in a Spanish hotel room at Lloret de Mar
The abuse by Smith began, Sarah says, with sexual touching, after Chris had gone to bed. Smith would jam the living room door to prevent the little boy coming into the room should he wake.
‘The first time, he laughed at me. I was frightened and didn’t want to do it, and he found that funny,’ says Sarah.
‘I knew what he was doing was wrong, but we’d been brought up not to argue and do what adults say.’
By the time Sarah was ten, Smith had started to use hypnotism to try to put her in a trance before raping her. Sarah, fearful of his violent temper, knew better than to resist.
‘He’d say to me: “You are getting sleepier and sleepier”, and I’d pretend to go along with it because he was going to do whatever he wanted to me anyway,’ she says.
‘Afterwards he would count me back out of the trance and say something like “you’ve had a dream” or “you’ve been somewhere nice and warm”.
‘He’d finish by asking: “So what have you been doing?” and I’d say: “Oh, I’ve had a nice dream”, and he would think that was great and send me off to bed.
‘I think he hoped I wouldn’t remember the abuse, because if I didn’t know it had happened, he didn’t need to feel guilty.’
So why didn’t Sarah tell her mother what was happening at the time?
‘She never wanted to hear anything bad about Martin. She knew he was beating us, but did nothing, so what was the point?’ asks Sarah.
‘As I grew older, I’d say to Mum: “I hate him. I can’t live in the same house as him”, but she’d just reply: “Fine, leave then.” When I asked her: “How am I supposed to leave? I haven’t got any money. We live in the middle of nowhere”, she’d say: “I don’t care. You either live with him or you don’t live with us.” ’
So Sarah plotted her escape, spending hours reading so she could one day go to college. And, aged 15, she was elated when Lianne and Martin separated after one of their rows.
‘We were really happy as a threesome, me, Mum and Chris, but then Martin came back for a weekend and Mum fell pregnant,’ says Sarah. ‘I’ll never understand why she wanted him back.’
Despite Lianne’s pregnancy, the abuse continued, but Sarah began to resist. When Smith tried to hypnotise her, she told him it didn’t work and never had.
‘I told him I didn’t want to do it any more. I told him I wanted a normal life and to go out and meet boys my own age,’ says Sarah.
‘Then he started saying how much he loved me and how sorry he was. He said he’d never wanted it to turn out this way,’ says Sarah.
‘He told me he wanted to leave my mum, marry me and have children together. I told him: “But you’re supposed to be my dad”, and he replied: “I want to walk you down the aisle, but I also want to be the person waiting for you at the altar.”
‘It’s very confusing to have a grown man, who has sexually abused you from the age of seven, crying, telling you he loves you. I hated him.
‘He made me promise not to go to the police, saying: “I have a child coming, you can’t send her father to prison.” ’
Sarah was 16 when her half-sister, Becky, was born. With Lianne working 12-hour days for social services, it was Sarah who cared full-time for the baby. ‘I was effectively her mum,’ says Sarah.
‘It was me and Chris who saw Becky’s first smile and her first steps, not them. I couldn’t have loved her more.’
After leaving home to study nursing at Northumbria University, Sarah cut off all contact with her stepfather, ignoring his calls and text messages as a means of coping with the ordeal he had put her through. Her mother was annoyed, but never asked Sarah why.
‘I gave Chris a secret mobile phone so he could let me know how Becky was. I convinced myself Martin would never hurt his own flesh and blood, so I was very upset when Chris told me Martin had thrown water in Becky’s face to stop her crying,’ says Sarah.
Betrayal: Lianne Smith pictured arriving at her first court appearance in Spain, callously ignored her daughter's claims of abuse
Then, when Chris was effectively kicked out of the family home, aged 16, after his last GCSE exam, Sarah felt there was no one left to protect Becky.
Determined that her little half-sister would not be at risk from the same torment she had suffered, she went to the police, urging them not to arrest Smith before she’d had a chance to tell her mother and younger brother about the abuse.
When she explained to Chris, who is now 20, what she had endured, he broke down in tears. ‘We were both crying. It was horrible for him, because he’d never suspected and felt he’d failed to protect me,’ says Sarah.‘He believed me instantly.’
The next day, she also told her mother. This time, however, the response was as cold as it was dismissive. ‘I said: “Mum, you know how Martin used to hit Chris?” and Mum replied: “No, he didn’t.” I went on: “You heard Chris getting thrown across a room. How can you pretend that didn’t happen?”
‘She just said: “Why is Chris spreading lies?” I told her: “They’re not lies, Mum, and it wasn’t just him hitting Chris, he did other things as well.”
‘She stopped me, and said: “If you are going to tell lies, you are no daughter of mine.” I started crying and she just walked off.
‘It was almost as though she already knew what I was going to say and didn’t want to hear it.’
Lianne never spoke to her daughter again. Instead, she and Smith fled to Spain in December 2007, while Smith was on bail pending trial for his abuse of Sarah. They tried to build a new life in Barcelona, where Lianne found work in a nursery and even gave birth to another child, Daniel.
Sarah didn’t even know of her half-brother’s existence until she was informed by police, when they came to tell her that Lianne and Martin had been tracked down.
Tragically, Sarah’s relief at Martin Smith’s arrest and extradition was short-lived. For less than two weeks later, her half-siblings were dead and their mother was in prison accused of their murder, having allegedly told police that she had killed Becky and baby Daniel rather than have them taken into care over the abuse charges against her partner.
‘I thought Becky needed protecting only from him,’ says Sarah, fighting back tears.
‘Never in a million years did I ever think she would need protecting from our mother, too.
‘How can an intelligent, rational, loving person kill two young children with their whole lives ahead of them . . . and one just a baby?’ she asks.
‘I’ll never understand and I can never forgive her for it. The worst part is that Becky and Daniel needn’t have been taken into care. I’d told social services that I would happily bring them up as my own if they were taken away from my mother. But it seems she would rather they were dead than live with me. She wouldn’t even let me and Chris bring their bodies home to Britain for a proper funeral. They were buried in Spain with no family present to say goodbye.’
Nor was Sarah’s ordeal quite over. For although Lianne is still awaiting trial in Spain, in December she gave evidence via video-link during Smith’s trial, tearfully insisting that the man she loved was ‘friendly, generous, kind’, and accusing Sarah of being a liar.
Even after Smith was found guilty last December, Lianne defended him in an interview from prison for this newspaper, describing him as the most honest person she had ever met. Chillingly, she went on to explain why her children died, after enjoying one last ‘wonderful holiday’ together.
‘Children in care have no chance,’ she said.
‘As a mother who loves her children, I couldn’t let them suffer like that. I had to protect them.’
The words love and protection, however, are not words Sarah would ever associate with her mother. After all, Lianne never protected her. Now, finally, the whole disturbing saga is nearing its conclusion.
Sarah could have been destroyed by everything she has been through, but she is determined to be a ‘survivor’, not a victim.
Last Easter, she married her boyfriend Mark, 23, an electrician, and she says she’s found in him all the love and security that she lacked during her childhood.
Yet astonishingly, she can’t bring herself to hate Lianne. ‘I love my mother, but she is a deeply flawed woman. I hope she is insane, because that at least would provide some kind of explanation. I don’t know who she is any more.’
‘The thing I hold on to is that if I hadn’t gone to the police my stepfather could have attacked Becky for as long as he attacked me,’ she says tearfully.
‘I could have had an 18-year-old on my doorstep asking: “You knew — why didn’t you do anything?”’
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